The use of Internet in newsgathering among European science journalists
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1. Introduction
This is a thesis about the construction of science news in Europe. It examines how
European science journalists are coping with the constraints of their job and how
Internet is changing their newsgathering routines. The main reasons for this
endeavour are simple: most research done on the socialization of science
journalists is decades old (Kiernan 2002, p.251), was conducted long before the
Internet invaded newsrooms, and reflects mainly a United States perspective.
To understand how science journalists in print media and news agencies all over
the European Union are working on a daily basis can give us a better perception
on how science institutions are building the public agenda on such an important
issue for society. At the same time, it is crucial to know how Internet is affecting
the newsgathering procedures of science journalists, and how this new tool has
changed the way they relate to the other participants in the news process.
Being a science journalist for the last 18 years, I am well aware of the problems of
involvement and detachment stated by Elias (1956) on his essay about the
relationships between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’. During this work, in order to
preserve the distance between the professional and the researcher, I will try to
‘hold up the mirror’ and keep both roles ‘clearly and consistently apart’, focusing
mostly on the results of my academic work on how the Internet is affecting the
role of journalists as science communicators.
In his landmark work on science and the media, Hillier Krieghbaum stated the
reasons why we should care about the transmission of science to the general
public: first, he said, the public needs to know science if it is to make ‘wise and
intelligent choices’ (Krieghbaum 1967, p.5); second, ‘unless there is a real
understanding of science and technology’, democracy may be at stake (p.12); and,
third, science is important because it is ‘an adventure of the human spirit’ (p.13).
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Some years later, in Science and the media, Peter Farago reinforced these
arguments: ‘Science is part of our contemporary culture (…) it’s a part of
humanity itself’ and scientific awareness is a fundamental pillar of a democratic
society, he wrote (Farago 1976, p.2/3). According to him, these characteristics are
enough to show the importance of science in our society and the need for its
transmission to lay audiences.
The reasons given by scholars for the communication of science to the public
have not changed much since then (McGowan 1985; Hartz and Chappell 1997)
and even science journalists, who Krieghbaum admitted sharing a different culture
from scientists (Krieghbaum 1967, p.38), have become more and more supportive
of science and its practices.
It was not always like this. During the first decades of the 20th century1, science
was portrayed in the media as an activity that took place in highly-respected and
distant institutions and was performed by almost semi-gods. At that time,
journalists saw themselves as the ones who could communicate with the Olympus
and bring the light to the people:
True descendants of Prometheus, science writers take the fire from
the scientific Olympus, the laboratories and the universities, and
bring it down to the people. (US science journalist William Laurence
cited by Nelkin 1987, p.1)
This deferential attitude of science journalists has marked the coverage of science
news since the beginning. Because they write about a very specific and often very
complicated theme, most science writers overtrust their sources and tend to be
uncritical of the research they are told about. Because of the complexity of most
of the issues scientists deal with, science writers also tend to stick to stories which
1
‘The new profession of science journalism arose in the United States in the years between the
World Wars”. Lewenstein, B. V. (2002). Science and the Media. Handbook of science and
technology studies. S. Jasanoff, J. C. Petersen, T. Pinch and G. E. Markle. Thousand Oaks, Sage:
343-360.
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are ‘of relevance to daily life’, stories ‘with a human-angle’ (Hansen 1994,
p.114)2.
The search for ‘stories with a human angle’ might be responsible for the fact that
medical news have been dominating the field of science journalism (Holliman,
Trench et al. 2002) and seem to be getting more and more space in both quality an
popular media (Tanner 2004)3. According to Bauer (1998), its style of reporting
has even contaminated other fields of science news:
The rhetorical features of alarming, personalising and appealing to
authority, once characteristic of biomedical news, are becoming
increasingly dominant feature of science writing. As biomedical
news is, to a larger extent, a news value of the popular press, and it
has been shown that, both on quantity and quality, biomedical news
is becoming dominant, one could argue this shows a narrowing gap
between popular and quality science journalism in the direction of
more homogeneous science reportage. (Bauer 1998, p.742)
However, the supremacy of health news is a relatively recent trend. After the
Second World War, the cold war dominated science news and the ‘breakthroughs’
of both Soviets and Americans were widely reported (Nelkin 1987, p.95). Only
with the 1960s, news started to become concerned with environmental and health
issues, and the transition from ‘a physical to a biomedical dominance in science
reportage occurred in the popular press by the early 80s, but not until the mid-
1990s in the quality press’ (Bauer 1998, p.743).
This change was also pushed by the beginning of the end of the post-war
patronage of science, with the industrial-scientific complex increasingly replacing
the military-scientific complex (ibidem). The need for funds pressed scientists to
turn to the press, and science journalists were eager to help: ‘More recently, in the
2
‘Interesting stories are, prototypically, “people stories.” A top producer, himself a space buff,
bemoaned the end of space stories during the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in 1975 and rejected those on
the exploration of Mars then already in the works, because “that’s with robots; I want men there.”’
(Gans 1979, p.155)
3
In her study of television health reporters, Tanner writes: ‘9 out of 10 reporters indicated that
when a health source provides personal examples for a particular story for the reporter to use, the
story idea has a good chance of making it into the air’. (Tanner 2004, p.359)
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80s, science writing, like other areas of journalism, has returned to a less critical
and more promotional style’. (Nelkin 1987, p.97). Science topics are nowadays
presented much more consensually than 40 years ago. In their study on the
coverage of science by the leading Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera over a
period of 50 years, Bucchi and Mazzolini (2003) noticed that controversies are
only visible in less than one fourth of the articles about science.
Despite this promotional style, the relations between scientists and journalists are
not without conflict. Belonging to a world that does not reward public
appearances, and it even abominates ‘publicity-seekers’ (Dibella, Ferri et al.
1991), scientists know by their own experience that ‘proeminence in the media
competes with reputation in science’ (Weingart 1998, p.870). The rules that a
scientist should follow when dealing with publicity were never actually written as
such, but Rae Goodell summarized them in her work The Visible Scientists: stay
in committees appointed by the administration or the Congress; research is a goal,
the rest is distraction; postpone public engagement until you are old; communicate
only with your peers; restrict action to activities that enhance public
understanding of science and funding; if politics, stay in the middle (Goodell
1977, p.92).
Most of these rules were already out of date when Goodell wrote about them. The
‘visibility system’, as she called it, was mainly responsible for this state of affairs:
Part of our government-by-crisis, visible scientists are catalysts in
the process of converting problems into visible issues. As
figureheads, they attract media (who follow public opinion) and
politicians (who follow the media and public opinion). (Goodell
1977, p.8)
The visibility system was slowly making its way into the science world, and
scientists were starting to be confronted with the need to speak to the public
through the media, maintaining what Nelkin (1987, p.169) called ‘their continued
ambivalence about the press’. Even when criticizing their colleagues for speaking
to the media, or criticizing the media for being inaccurate (Tankard and Ryan
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1974; Glynn and Tims 1982; Moore and Singletary 1985; Pellechia 1997),
scientists became increasingly aware of the importance of the ‘visibility system’:
Scientists believe that national visibility through the media is useful
for ensuring favourable science policy and the financial support
required to sustain costly research facilities. Some use the media to
advance an ideological agenda that they believe may have social
importance. Whatever their reason, scientists and their institutions
are increasingly seeking to define science news and to shape the
content and style of science communication. (Nelkin 1996)
But science journalists are not the only ones constructing science, as Latour and
Woolgar (1979) have clearly showed in Laboratory Life:
Scientific activity is not “about nature”, it is a fierce fight to
construct reality. The laboratory is the workplace and the set of
productive forces, which make construction possible. (Latour and
Woolgar 1979, p.243)
Readers of this thesis should bear in mind that all scientific activity is a
construction of reality by itself. Scientists are not pure creatures, living in an ideal
world; they want to be known and they want to take credit for what they do.
Scientists claim ‘merely to be scientists discovering facts’, write Latour and
Woolgar, but they are actually ‘writers and readers in the business of being
convinced and convincing others.’ (Latour and Woolgar 1979, p.88)
The need for funds in a more and more competitive environment, and the
assertion that media prominence could help them in achieving that objective
(Dunwoody and Ryan 1985), took scientists and scientific institutions to create
increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to influence the news like, for instance,
‘expanded public relations efforts and increased communication controls over the
dissemination of information to the press’ (Nelkin 1987, p.131).
These communication controls have become easier with the introduction of
Internet in the newsrooms, as this thesis will show. Organizational and
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economical pressures on science journalists are also making them work in
increasingly tighter deadlines, and the concerns about their audiences are, as some
authors have suggested, tabloidizing and standartizing the information. As a
consequence of this dependence on pre-prepared news by the sources, the media
are no longer scrutinizing the actions of the other actors of society, as independent
observers, organising and facilitating the public debate, a traditional role for the
media in Western democracies.
In this tradition, the expression Fourth Estate, coined by Edmund Burke in the 18th
century, had its own weight: we were talking about an independent institution that
could limit or control the abuses of power in all the other estates. This perspective
on the role of the media, commonly called the competitive (or normative)
paradigm view, is opposed to the dominance paradigm, which asserts that:
“rather than facilitating equal competition between diverse ideas and
value systems, journalism is a cultural apparatus, the primary
function of which is to maintain relations of domination and
subordination between fundamentally unequal groups in society”.
(McNair 1998, p.22)
Are journalists contributing to this domination and subordination between societal
groups? In the case of science journalism, it is clear that, by changing their
newsgathering routines as a consequence of the penetration of Internet in
newsrooms, journalists are abandoning investigative journalism and feature
stories to concentrate in breaking news, prepared by scientific journals to get the
attention of potential funding institutions. Many times, because of audiences and
internal pressures, these breaking news stories are blown up, particularly in the
area of health:
Most television medical reporting today doesn´t help as much as it
confuses, because it provides no context, follows no trends, and
fosters unrealistic expectations on the part of the viewing audience.
(Schwitzer 1992).
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An article in the British Medical Journal showed how the media overplayed the
cold drug pleconaril when the trial results were made public, but failed to follow
up the rejection decision by the FDA, based on those same (scientifically poor)
trial results: ‘The FDA advisory committee unanimously recommended rejecting
the manufacturer's application. The company announced that it was ending trials
five months later.’ (Schwitzer 2003)
An even more recent article, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
showed how media reports had a strong influence in the prescription of Diane-35,
an androgen-blocking combination drug with contraceptive properties (Mintzes,
Morgan et al. 2005).
Science journalists are also accepting the control of scientific information by a
series of rules established by their sources, like the embargo, and see it as serving
the public interest (Kiernan 2002, p.240). Even if some authors, like Goodell
(1977), defend that the embargo system distorts the image of science to the
general public and serves mainly the publicity interests of scientific journals.
As a consequence of all these constraints, science journalists rarely confront the
scientific institutions and very seldom uncover scientific fraud or report about
wrongdoings in the scientific world. At the same time, science journalists have
become more and more supportive of science and its practices, showing
sometimes a religious creed on its trustworthiness:
We write about science because we love science and want to
communicate our fascination with the natural world. (Rensberger
2000, p.61)
This statement of Rensberger is just one, among many, that shows how science
journalists are becoming closer to their sources, are fascinated by the science
world and, because of that, often abandon the ‘watchdog’ role they hold in the
competitive model.
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In this thesis, we will try to understand if infodiversity4 in science news is
diminishing, even if the Internet was expected to raise the amount of information
available for science journalists to write about. The constraints of science
journalists – mostly due to the industrial production model of today’s journalism –
are affecting infodiversity, the proximity of journalists to their sources and
competitors is causing changes in the traditional news gathering procedures of
science journalism. Internet ‘ready to wear’ breaking news from scientific journals
is also contributing to the loss of diversity in science journalism, making it
similar, no matter where in the world journalists are writing from.
In the next chapter, we will analyse the bibliography on the construction of
science news and the studies on the sociology of journalists. Focusing on the
research on science journalists, we will talk about the constraints of these
professionals, as well as their relationship with the Internet as a source for news,
ideas and press releases. Although this is a thesis on the production of science
news, we will also analyse the research done on the public understanding of
science, as it can provide some context for the results of this project.
In chapter 3, readers will make contact with the methodology of our research
project, both the survey and the subsequent interviews with European science
journalists.
Chapter 4 will present the results of a survey of science journalists working on
staff for general print media and news agencies in 14 different countries of the
European Union (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom), the
main research instrument for this thesis. The results of the interviews with 12 of
these European science journalists will be presented in chapter 5.
4
In this context, “infodiversity” means diversity of information sources. It is a neologism imported
from biology: “biodiversity”, or “biological diversity” is, according to the UN Convention
Biological Diversity, “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter
alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they
are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.”
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In chapter 6 we will start by discussing both the methodology and the
involvement/detachment problems of this project. Then we will discuss the results
of the survey and of the interviews, comparing them with previous research on the
subject. The chapter will be organized in order to answer the three main questions
of this project: Who are the European Union science journalists working in
national print media and news agencies? What are their attitudes and
expectations? How is Internet transforming science journalism in Europe? The
chapter will finish by presenting some directions for further research in the field.
Finally, in chapter 7, we will present the conclusions of this thesis. There, we will
try to put our findings in perspective and explain what they mean for the present
and future of science journalism in Europe.
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2. The construction of news
In their seminal work on the construction of reality, Berger and Luckmann (1967)
argue that people create and sustain all social phenomena through practice:
The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by
the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful
conducts of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts
and actions, and is maintained as real by these. (Berger and
Luckmann 1967, p.33)
If we apply this theoretical framework to the media, we can say that ‘news is not a
veridical account of reality, but a social and cultural construction of journalists
and their sources’ (Ericson, Baranek et al. 1987, p.346). And this means that,
contrary to what many journalists sustain, news is not an immaculate description
of reality, but the product of the interactions of the people intervening in the news
process.
Social constructionism, however, contains a multiplicity of approaches. Best
(1995) talks about ‘strict constructionists’, who argue that social problem analysts
should avoid making any assumptions about objective reality, and ‘contextual
constructionists’, who accept that there are objective realities that must be taken
into account when analysing any problems:
Analysts who hope to understand how and why social problems
emerge and evolve must locate claims making within its context. By
default, all constructionist analysis becomes a form of contextual
constructionism. (Best 1995, p.348)
This research project, as others in the area of science news (Dunwoody 1999;
Kiernan 2002), falls in the latter category. The objects studied by scientists, such
as birds or rocks, have an objective reality, and the scientific papers they produce
really exist. However, I maintain, as others have done in the past, that